Cheating is wrong. Cheating hurts our community by undermining academic integrity, creating mistrust, and fostering unfair competition. The university will punish cheaters with failure on an assignment, failure in a course, permanent transcript notation, suspension, and/or expulsion. Offenses may be reported to medical, law, or other professional or graduate schools when a cheater applies.

Violations can include cheating on exams, plagiarism, reuse of assignments without permission, improper use of the internet and electronic devices, unauthorized collaboration, alteration of graded assignments, forgery and falsification, lying, facilitating academic dishonesty, and unfair competition. Ignorance of these rules is not an excuse.

Academic honesty is required in all work you submit to be graded. Except where the instructor specifies group work, you must solve all homework and programming assignments without the help of others. For example, you must not look at anyone else’s solutions (including program code) to your homework problems. However, you may discuss assignment specifications (not solutions) with others to be sure you understand what is required by the assignment.

If your instructor permits using fragments of source code from outside sources, such as your textbook or online resources, you must properly cite the source. Not citing it constitutes plagiarism. Similarly, group projects must list everyone who participated.

Falsifying program output or results is prohibited.

Your instructor is free to override parts of this policy for particular assignments. To protect yourself: (1) Ask the instructor if you are not sure what is permissible; (2) Seek help from the instructor, TA, or CAs—as you are always encouraged to do—rather than from other students; and (3) Cite any questionable sources of help you may have received.

On every exam, you will sign the following pledge: “I agree to complete this exam without unauthorized assistance from any person, materials, or device. [Signed and dated].” Your course instructors will let you know where to find copies of old exams, if they are available.

For more information on university ethics, see the university’s undergraduate academic ethics policy and graduate-specific policies.

Last updated September 2021.